George Osborne’s Whack-a-Mole tactic is denying Labour any advantage

The Conservative high command is focusing its 2015 campaign on neutralising the enemy

Success in politics requires a convincing leader, armed with a compelling case that finds favour with enough voters to secure a governing majority. It also requires an effective operation capable of crushing your enemies. Under David Cameron, the Conservatives have yet to achieve the former. The signs are multiplying, however, that they have created the latter. Having seen off the Liberal Democrats, and being well on their way to neutralising Labour, it is now possible to say that the Tories are winning the political battle – even if their leader has yet to find the formula he needs to secure substantial popular support.

Consider the past 24 hours. After a weekend centred on Ed Miliband’s New Year interview with Andrew Marr, Labour launched its latest welfare initiative – only to see it shot down in a joint attack by Iain Duncan Smith and Theresa May. Having learnt that Rachel Reeves, the well-regarded shadow work and pensions secretary, planned to announce new limits on access to unemployment benefits, the two Cabinet heavyweights got there first with their own pledge to restrict housing benefit for EU migrants.

The detail of each side’s policy didn’t matter; it was easy to find fault in both. No, this was about strike and counter-strike, about sowing enough confusion over Labour’s plans to blunt their impact and deny the party publicity. If the Opposition’s intention was to win back some credibility for Ed Miliband on welfare reform – in the face of popular support for Tory toughness – it patently failed.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the Palace of Westminster, the Lib Dems found themselves unable to escape from the death-grip of Lord Rennard. The party’s former chief executive, backed by lawyers and bolstered by his allies in the Lords, defied Nick Clegg by insisting on his right to rejoin the party’s ranks on the red benches. Confronted with a popular uprising among the grassroots – and in particular among Lib Dem women – Mr Clegg succeeded in suspending Lord Rennard pending what appears to be yet another inquiry into the peer’s conduct.

Again, the detail is less interesting than the overall impression, which is of a party in turmoil, one that only gets noticed for all the wrong reasons. No wonder the Lib Dem leader sounded uncharacteristically hesitant when he took to the airwaves to defend his position. His political pitch seems to be to make constant complaints about those dreadful Tories, over the background noise of internal strife.

Of course, the Conservative high command are too fearful to indulge in complacency; rather, I detect a grim determination to do anything it takes to help the cause in 2015. George Osborne and Lynton Crosby may not be able to make Mr Cameron or his party popular, but they can mount a relentless campaign to close off every possible advantage for Mr Miliband, and to reduce Mr Clegg to insignificance.

There is an interesting irony here. This year marks the 20th anniversary of Mr Osborne’s arrival at Conservative Central Office – when he was hired to man the anti-Lib Dem attack desk. In those days, the third party was the “yellow peril” that struck terror into the hearts of Tory MPs with its anti-establishment message and hyper-local tactics. Two decades on, the Lib Dems are stuck on single figures and in fourth place behind Ukip in the polls; they face losing half their Commons seats; and their leader’s personal ratings are abysmal. Mr Osborne might be tempted to conclude that his life’s work is therefore done.

Privately, the Tories judge that the Lib Dems are finished and no longer deserve attention. Their hope is that by next year, Mr Clegg will have become irrelevant in a two-way fight between Conservatives and Labour. The party’s focus is henceforth on the Opposition. Mr Osborne has served notice to all Tory ministers that every pronouncement from now on must be framed to create a dividing line with Labour. His orders are that enemy foxes are to be shot on sight. Or, to use another mammalian metaphor, the approach is a form of Whack-a-Mole: wherever a Labour idea pops up, it will be neutralised either by attack (as with Mr Miliband’s recent plan to break up the banks) or by adoption (as with Mr Osborne’s conversion to cracking down on payday loans).

Tory polling shows that Labour has no economic credibility, that Ed Balls is a liability, and that Mr Miliband is unconvincing as a future prime minister. The Opposition is therefore to be harried and persecuted at every turn, via the kind of systematic onslaught that it specialised in when Tony Blair was in charge and Gordon Brown ran the election machine. Indeed, I am not the only one to have detected a touch of Mr Brown in the Chancellor’s approach – Douglas Carswell, the free-thinking Tory MP for Clacton, calls him George Osbrown. There are plenty more in the higher echelons who complain that, by adopting the dividing-line tactics of his sworn enemy, Mr Osborne is in danger of confusing the Tory message and diluting the potency of its core argument about the economy and who is fit to manage it.

To which Mr Osborne has an unashamed answer, which to my mind explains away Westminster’s preoccupation with the confusion between tactical Osborne and strategic Osborne. We forget sometimes that the Chancellor’s reputation was shredded by the “omnishambles” Budget of 2012, and that he is at heart a Tory politician who wants to win, and survive. And since he will be judged by his party on his success or failure in 2015, he reserves the right to pick his fights.

Successful generals chose their battlefields with care, and so it is with the Chancellor. Indeed, if there is a Labour figure whose example he embraces, it is not Mr Brown, but Mr Blair, who taught his party to deny its enemies any advantage. Mr Osborne wants to fight Labour on the economy, welfare and education – not energy prices, the minimum wage or pensioner entitlements. To him, the short-term pain and embarrassment that come from changing tack or backing down are worth it, if they deny Labour an advantage. And to those who say such tactical opportunism sits ill with talk of long-term, grown-up government, the Chancellor points to high-speed rail, the renewal of nuclear power (with foreign help) or planning reform as grave decisions that have produced only political pain.

Politics today is more fluid than ever, not least because voters are uninterested and unimpressed. Ukip may have its own troubles – Nigel Farage showed his taste for political risk yesterday by suggesting women are worth less in the City – but it is playing havoc with Labour support in the North and is on course to lay waste to the Tories in the European elections in May.

The polls may show Labour support declining steadily as the economy heals and the party comes under greater scrutiny. But they also show that the Tories are not gaining useful ground. Mr Osborne, who is now in charge of the whole Conservative attack rather than just a small piece of it, is doing what is asked of him. If the Lib Dem position is, as he claims, irrecoverable – the vagaries of politics must suggest that is not yet certain – and a relentless onslaught does indeed prevent Labour from being heard, he will have given Mr Cameron the space he needs to put himself and his offer to the electorate: of a grown-up government that is steadily putting the country back to rights.